The Jetpack Boogie: A Dieselpunk Adventure (The Crossover Case Files Book 4), Page 2

  When thought of neither in terms of distance nor time, though, Chavez Ravine was incredibly far from Imelda’s Wilshire Boulevard spread. The ravine snaked into the hillside, little houses pushed up against the incline on either side. It was a neighborhood of dirt streets and cracked window panes, a few chickens prowling the yards and often the sound of joyous Mexican music coming from doors left open to let the breeze in and the heat out. There wasn’t a fancy door or plush carpet or oak desk anywhere in the ravine, and I felt more comfortable there than just about anywhere else in this world that wasn’t my own.

  I parked my Winslow in front of Guillermo’s house, the little workshop at the back with its Garcia Industries sign nailed above its open sliding door. Guillermo’s little mechanical dog, Perdida, came trotting up to me, her too-big eyes concealing cameras that sent information to the whirring brain. Perdida knew me, as much as that was possible, and seemed glad to see me. Even though I knew the wagging tail was nothing more than a function of her programming, I couldn’t help feeling glad to see her, too.

  The little dog followed me across the patchy grass in the front yard and into the workshop, where I found not Guillermo Garcia but rather my assistant, Carmelita, hard at work on her new left eye. Most of her face had been repaired after a bullet had torn through the mechanisms and the outer shell of her left cheek and eye socket, but Guillermo still hadn’t been able to get it quite right. Where Carmelita had been the picture of beauty before getting shot, she now had a certain asymmetry to her features, and it wasn’t just because her eye hadn’t been put back in place yet. She sat on a stool at Guillermo’s work bench, the eye held in a vice mounted to the table and wires leading away from it to one of the oscilloscopes on the bench. Carmelita held a soldering iron in her right hand and a magnifying glass in the other, seemingly unaware that Perdida and I had walked into the shop.

  The little dog circled my feet once and then sat, looking expectantly at Carmelita. When she didn’t look up, Perdida gave out a little whine.

  “Hello, Perdida,” Carmelita said without looking up. Then she added, “Are you going to whimper, too, Jed? Or are you going to say hello?”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you,” I said, looking intently at the operation she was carrying out on the eye and wondering what went into such a mechanical marvel. Now that Carmelita knew she wasn’t human, she had proved herself invaluable, doing as many of the repairs on herself as she could and thus freeing Guillermo for the more delicate work and for the other jobs he had to get done—jobs that he and I both found more pressing even though Carmelita likely would have disagreed.

  “You walked in here,” she said, still not looking up. “Isn’t that already a disturbance?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “How’s the eye coming along?”

  She looked up then, giving me a little smile to signal the banter had all been good natured. “Good, I think,” she said. Then she set the soldering iron and magnifier down, turning her attention to the scope beside her. Turning a dial caused the green field on the scope to fade, and a different image appeared. At first, I was confused by what I was seeing—two dark lines a few inches apart with several scratchy lines in between them. But then Carmelita loosened the vice and turned the eye toward me; a blur on the screen corresponded with the movement, and then I saw the image of my face looking out at me from the scope. I realized that the first image on the scope had been of the workbench’s wooden top.

  Carmelita smiled at this, but then the image warped like I was looking at a funhouse mirror and her smile faded. Soon, the image started rolling, a whole succession of Jed Straits revolving up from the bottom of the screen and disappearing at the top while another Jed followed.

  “Damn it!” Carmelita spat, flicking the power switch on the scope and killing the dizzying procession of Jeds.

  “Don’t get upset,” I offered although I knew the advice wouldn’t be taken. “You’re obviously making progress.”

  She sighed and said nothing for a moment, staring at the eye and tapping a finger on the scarred bench. Finally, she said, “You’re right. Progress is good. But progress isn’t the same as finished, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “And I want to be finished, Jed.” She looked up at me with her one eye, an empty socket where the other should have been. “I want to get back to work, real work. Not tinkering with solder and gears.”

  “I understand, but this is valuable work, too, you know?”

  “I know. But I still want to get back to it. How is work anyway?”

  I shrugged. “It’s been slow. I just started a new case today.”

  She looked eager. “Tell me about it?”

  “It’s a missing person. A missing witness, really. For one of Imelda’s clients.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Do you think you can find her?”

  “I think there’s a pretty good chance. My guess is that a model turned executive’s wife doesn’t have a lot of experience going into hiding.”

  “Well…thanks for sharing,” she said, and I picked up a bit of self-pity in her tone. I knew she’d had about enough of being relegated to the shadows in Chavez Ravine while Guillermo oversaw her repairs, but there was nothing I could to help her mood. “How’s Peggy?” she asked after a moment, an obvious effort at changing the subject.

  “Fine,” I said. “Should I send her over to visit you one of these afternoons? When it’s quiet in the office?”

  Carmelita smiled again at this.

  “That would be nice,” she said. “If you could spare her, of course.”

  “I’m sure that could be arranged.”

  The twisted smile faded again, and the single eye got a faraway look in it.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. And then, assuming I knew the answer to my own question, I added, “You can’t let a little setback like that get you down, Carmelita.” I nodded toward the eye. “You’ll get it. Or Guillermo will. Or Osvaldo. Three of the greatest minds in the world right here in Chavez Ravine, right? It’ll come together. Before you know it, this will all be behind you.”

  She nodded, a little doubtfully. “But what then?”

  “Come again?”

  “I may never be like I was, Jed. Do you really think you’ll be able to use me like before?”

  “Of course,” I said, but I knew there was more to what she was thinking.

  And then she spilled it. “Do you think I’ll be able to advance like I was? You know…to make partner someday?”

  I should have known. Carmelita’s sense of legitimacy had been a sore spot with her for a while, possibly a nagging sense deep in the cogs of the modified code-breaking machine that was her brain. Deep in those moving parts had somehow been born the knowledge that she wasn’t like other women, a troublesome thought that she finally understood now. And though that understanding had brought some relief, there had been other insecurities birthed with it. Some of them probably felt like chasms to Carmelita, awareness of inadequacies she’d never be able to overcome. When she’d thought she was human, she’d met these niggling doubts by pushing for a promotion to full partner status at Jed Strait Private Investigations. And now that she knew she wasn’t human, that possibility had apparently abandoned her, even as the troubling thoughts had doubled down. There was no more wondering at the vague sense that she was different. Now it was knowledge, and her difference was definite, incontrovertible.

  Without hesitating, I answered her question. “Yes, Carmelita. This doesn’t change things. How could it? I knew the truth about you before you did, remember? I made you the offer that I’d make you partner if you kept advancing when I knew what you were, and I’m going to stick to it now that we both know.”

  The twisted smile returned. “Really?” There was hope in her voice now, and I was glad to have helped it get there.

  “Really.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “All right then. What’s my next task going to be?”

  I chuckled at her enthusiasm. “W
hy don’t you just work on getting yourself restored first? Then we’ll talk about a new task.”

  She shook her head. “I want it now. It’ll give me something to look forward to, motivation to get back to work.”

  “You seem plenty motivated,” I said, but I could see she wasn’t going to let it go. When Carmelita got hold of an idea, it was often as hard to dislodge it from her as it would have been to pry a dead mouse from Perdida’s mechanical jaws after she’d worked so hard to stalk and catch the vermin. “All right,” I conceded. “How about…how about you learn a new skill that will help the business?”

  “Any skill?” she asked.

  “As long as it helps the business,” I repeated.

  “And what’s your definition of learned?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Reliably repeatable. Consistent and demonstrable. Does that sound fair?”

  The twisted smile widened, and in the widening I noticed that it looked much closer to an actual smile now. “Yes,” she said. “Very fair.”

  Then, as though a switch had been flipped, she turned her attention back to the vice and the mechanical eyeball held between its iron teeth. Carmelita was finished with me, I saw. Any further small talk would be like an annoying fly buzzing around her head, slowing her progress as she moved toward her goal.

  “I’ll see you later this evening,” I said and then turned to leave the workshop, not expecting to hear any sort of acknowledgement from her and wondering if I’d just gotten myself into a new kind of trouble.

  * * * * * *

  The scene in Guillermo’s living room was a different version of what I’d just seen in the workshop. Instead of an electronic eyeball in a vice, it was the whole crossover machine situated in the middle of the room, and instead of a partly disassembled robot struggling to repair herself, it was Guillermo Garcia and his assistant Osvaldo fine tuning a contraption I’d come to hate.

  Guillermo looked up when I walked in, Perdida still trailing behind me.

  “Lobo!” he said, his smile widening. “You finally made it. I was starting to think you were hiding from me.”

  Playing along, I said, “I was hiding, Guillermo, but Perdida kept sniffing me out, so I gave up.”

  He chuckled and said, “She’s a good dog. I built her that way, yes?”

  “You certainly did. How’s this going? We still set for tonight?”

  “Yes. It’s good. We’ll be ready.”

  He handed Osvaldo the stack of papers that served as the crossover machine’s manual and said something in Spanish. His assistant, still not comfortable with eye contact or much else when it came to interacting with anyone but Carmelita, said nothing but picked up a screwdriver and started making an adjustment. I assumed he was following his mentor’s instructions. At any rate, Guillermo seemed pleased with the response, as he turned back toward me, his smile still wide, and said, “Come on in the kitchen. I have some things to show you.”

  I did as I’d been asked, following the old man through to the tiny kitchen at the back of the house. More than once, I’d suggested that Guillermo should cash in on a few of his inventions and buy himself a bigger place, but he always answered the same way: “What do I need a bigger place for? I know where everything is here. In a bigger place, I’ll just lose the things I need.” By now, I’d given up on convincing him that he deserved the finer things in life. He was sure he already had them.

  The kitchen table was in no way ready for anyone to eat at. There wasn’t a square inch of the tabletop visible. Among the pieces of equipment that I saw there were a small box with what looked like a camera lens mounted to it, another modified oscilloscope, and a respectable-looking amplifier. Leaning in a corner next to a broom was a rather battered guitar, something that Guillermo had probably sent Osvaldo out to liberate from a pawnshop. Also scattered on the tabletop were coils of wire, a variety of electronic meters and leads, an array of batteries, and other technological paraphernalia beyond my powers to describe.

  “I’m not sure if I should be more afraid of that machine out there or all this in here,” I said as I followed Guillermo’s lead and pulled a chair out to sit next to him at the table.

  He chuckled at this and said, “Nothing to fear here, lobo. You know that.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know. Doesn’t make me any braver, though.”

  I watched as Guillermo reached for the box with the lens on it. It had leather straps fixed to it and a few buckles. A harness, I thought. He popped open the back of the box and took out a shiny disk the size of a coaster.

  “Look familiar?” he asked.

  It did, as I recalled similar disks I’d encountered upon first arriving in California. Those had been used in a Nazi apparatus that had triggered some of my first shifts in consciousness, sending my thoughts into an alternate world and the mind of another Jed Strait. The disks had had old news reels transferred onto them, like records that played movies rather than just sound.

  “I figured out how they work,” he said, beaming. “And my own. Watch.”

  He opened another little box, this one looking like a cannibalized Bakelite radio. Instead of a dial showing the stations, it had a little turntable built into it. He slipped the disk onto the plate and slid the whole thing back inside the box. Then he connected leads from the back of the box to the front of the oscilloscope, let the tubes warm up, and turned a knob on the box. A hazy picture, not unlike the one I’d seen through the camera of Carmelita’s eye, appeared on the screen, and the picture was moving.

  The image appeared to have been shot in an office somewhere. I saw what looked like the corner of a desk and, across the way, the lower drawers of a filing cabinet. The vantage point of the camera was low, like whoever had shot the footage had been lying on the floor. The camera moved around the room, showing baseboards and a door, but the images were grainy, and since the camera almost never held still for more than a few seconds, it was difficult to tell what exactly I was looking at.

  When the image stopped, I looked from the screen to Guillermo and saw that his smile had somehow managed to widen even more than normal, something I wouldn’t have thought possible.

  “What are we looking at?” I asked.

  “That’s my living room,” he said.

  “You’ve had it redecorated and filmed by racoons?”

  He chuckled. “No, no. Not racoons. Perdida.”

  Now it made sense, and not just the perspective of the shots. I pictured the little dog with the boxy camera strapped to her back with the leather harness, but that wasn’t all I pictured. It was easy to recall what I’d seen a few weeks back—Perdida leaping through the gateway to another world, a different pouch on her back with a little white rat inside. The rat had been used to test whether or not crossing over with the machine was dangerous to the traveler. That experiment long finished and the question settled to Guillermo’s satisfaction, he must have moved on to the next phase—determining what was on the other side of the portal. This, he had explained to me more than a week ago, was what he had wanted to achieve before the next step of sending a human being through.

  I’d known he was ready for the next step, as he’d told me the time had come. But I hadn’t known how he had determined his readiness. Now I knew.

  Pointing at the screen, I asked, “That’s what your living room looks like in the other world?”

  “Si.”

  “And you’re sure it’s the same world Elsa jumped into?” As I asked, it was impossible to keep an image from popping into my mind: Elsa Schwartz passing through the crossover machine after having shot Carmelita in the face.

  Again, he said, “Si.”

  But as he said it, I noticed a fading of his energy, a dimming of his smile and the light in his eyes.

  He’s been working too hard, I thought, well aware of how much time he’d spent getting Carmelita repaired to the point where she could finish the job herself—and at the same time working on the crossover machine not only to make it more re
liable but also to learn what was on the other side. And all of this done with his standard good cheer and seemingly endless energy. He had to hit a wall at some point, and I feared I was watching him head for that crash now.

  “Are you sure you’re not working too hard, Guillermo?” I asked. “There’s no reason we have to do this tonight, you know. Elsa’s been over there a couple of weeks, I know, but one or two more days before I start tracking her down can’t make that much of a difference, can it?”

  Now his smile shifted all the way over to sadness, his lips not moving but his eyes looking like he was gazing into a casket. It lasted only for a few seconds, and then he caught himself, the twinkle coming back but not yet at full throttle.

  “We’re ready, lobo. I’ve done all the tests. Checked the other side over and over. Always at night and never past that room, it’s true.” He pointed at the scope for emphasis, and I thought it was interesting that he indicated the room in the other world rather than pointing to the doorway and his own living room beyond it. “But we are as ready as we can be, yes?”

  I nodded, filled with doubts of my own but not willing to share them with him when he was seeming so vulnerable. “Are you worried that you haven’t gotten more of a picture of that world than what’s in that little office?”

  He took a moment to respond, as though he’d needed to process what I’d just said. This, too, was uncharacteristic of Guillermo, and I felt that if it wasn’t exhaustion slowing his reactions, then it must be something else. There was a detail he wasn’t telling me about, some part of the whole process we were working on that made him uneasy.

  And yet, when he did respond, it was with his normal enthusiasm. “Si, si. That’s been on my mind.”

  “Well, we’ve done our best, though, haven’t we?” I replied. And I really thought we had. The machine had been repaired and fine-tuned after getting damaged in my last confrontation with Elsa. And it had been moved into the house from the workshop to thwart a possible attack should Elsa be lying in wait on the other side, awaiting me in whatever version of Guillermo’s workshop she’d stepped into. There’d been no sign of her on the images Perdida had brought back, and every other test Guillermo had run had come back showing no reason for alarm.